Live Music and Free Beer

The night after Corp, we were all pretty tired, but still wanted to do something. Joey mentioned how some friends of his from class were in a band, and were playing at Bar One. Thinking that this would be fun (and at the very least, a chance to meet some more English people to reinforce which country we were actually in), a bunch of us agreed to go. Just before 9, we (being Joey, Patrick, Fiona, Elizabeth, Lise, Shannon, Elizabeth O, Zac, Karsten, Stephi and myself) headed over. Thinking that the band started at 9, we were worried that we would be late and miss them play - but when we got there, and met Tom and Aaron from the band, they told us that they were actually performing as a part of a Battle of the Bands competition, but they wouldn't be playing until around 11. So then we had a few hours to kill!

We managed to find a booth (strangely enough, the same one we'd found at Super Bowl. I now think of this as "our booth", even though odds are we won't get to sit there again!), and all got a couple of drinks and sat chatting for a while. After about 20 minutes, this middle-aged guy comes up to us and wants to know if he can have a chat to us about our drinking habits. We were all a bit sceptical at first, but then he mentioned that he would "give us a couple of quid", so we decided to take the risk of coming across as young alcoholics.

The guy comes back with a voice recorder, and tells us that he's doing some independent market research on people's drinking. He asks us questions like, what makes a beer and cider night different from a spirits night? Do we mix our spirits, or take them neat? Why do we pick any particular cider or beer? Do we pay attention to the specials boards? Does the brand advertising behind the bar have any part in what we end up buying? Because we're all poor international students, I don't know whether he was happy or not to find out that a lot of our drinking habits are based around price... I mean, I enjoy more expensive brands occasionally, but usually I'll just ask for the house bourbon (or [insert spirit here]), and I know of several people here who ask at the bar what the cheepest beer is and go for that. However, I do think we gave him something to work with, because he thanked us, and as he was leaving, pulled out forty pounds from his wallet. Forty pounds!! That's about $65-70 Australian. And he just left it for us. It was amazing.

Joey and Zac were elected to be the Spenders of the Money, and came back with three huge pitchers of beer for us to share. They were enormous (and really heavy), so Fiona, Elizabeth and I immediately took the opportunity to take photos with them (which annoyed Zac no end, who just wanted to drink the stuff). It was very exciting. I had a pint of it before I remembered that I don't really like beer, so I gifted the rest of mine to Karsten (who accused me of trying to get him drunk. It wasn't my intention, but if it happened, I would be entertained, so I couldn't really deny that!). It was around this time as well that Stephi came back with some hot chips, which smelled so good that the rest of us couldn't stop thinking about them for the rest of the evening.

Finally, 11pm rolled around and we got up to hear Joey's friends play. Their band is called 'Kettle o' Fish', and they're actually really good. They're a bit folky, and have a double bass, acoustic guitar, keyboard, vocals and a tambourine, and were fun and easy to listen to. I would definitely go and see them again. After that, we went back and indulged in chips and onion rings - which were amazing - and chatted to Tom and Aaron from the band while we waited to be able to vote for them. We did that, then somehow managed to lose Elizabeth and then find her again before heading home at about 1am. I'm still not sure how Kettle o' Fish ended up going in the competition, but I hope they did well!

School Shirts, Sticky Floors and Quad Vods

You remember how a couple of weeks ago I tried to get into a club wearing a school uniform, but we bailed because the line was too long and made our own party? If not, the entry's here. Well anyway, the following Wednesday I went and saw Black Swan with Fiona, Allen, Adam and Massi. I found the film super intense, and I think I'll have to watch it again to grasp fully what it meant. Adam made the film more of a comedy though - there's one scene where Natalie Portman throws up in the bathroom, and Adam leant over to Allen and said "That's going to be you later tonight!". Considering the tone of the film, I think we needed that spot of comic relief. Thanks, Adam.

Anyway, afterwards, we decided to try and get tickets for Corp, which was on that night. We walked to a bunch of different bars and places that said they were selling tickets, and then found that everywhere was sold out. After a bit of deliberation, it was decided that we'd get there at 9pm - an hour before it opened - to make sure that we'd actually get in this time. After a brief pregame at our place, where we indulged in cider and wine, we grabbed our stuff and headed over to the taxis. I got a text message from Lauri around this time, asking if I was going to Corp, and when I replied yes, and said that we were heading over then and would he like to join us, he told me that he already had a ticket and would meet us there. I wish I'd been clever enough to think of buying a ticket before the day of.

So we get to the club at about ten past 9, and success! There were only about fifteen people in line before us, which essentially meant that we were definitely going to get in. Shannon had had the bright idea of filling a Sprite bottle with wine, so even though it was totally foul, we never lost our buzz. Patrick even found the pub around the corner, so there wasn't any need for that kind of adventure! We got in after waiting for a little bit more than an hour, and were in the first group of people allowed into the club. Even in the excitement of actually getting in there, we noticed that the floor was already sticky. I didn't really want to know how... general consensus is that the people at Corp don't really clean the floors properly because it's just going to get sticky again.

We went up to the bar on the top floor, and tried to figure out what to order. Everything was served in plastic pint glasses, which is good because if you drop them they won't hurt you. We started off with these things called Blue Pints... I'm still not entirely sure what was in them, but they tasted like sugar, so I was happy. We eventually made our way down to one of the dancefloors, where they were playing stuff like the Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party, which was fun to dance to. We eventually moved down to the main dancefloor, where they were clearly big fans of the smoke machine, and they were playing everything from Black Eyed Peas to Katy Perry to Robbie Williams, and it was so much fun! Except for when I found out that there's no Robbie Williams in Virginia, which made me sad. I can't imagine life without Let Me Entertain You.

It was while we were on the dancefloor that we started buying quad vods. Don't worry, you read that right. One of the reasons that Corp is so popular - other than because it's kind of fun to dress up in a school uniform - is this particular drink. It's four shots of vodka with a mixture in one of those plastic cups. They're actually cheaper than getting a triple, and I'm a little bit hazy on the legality of them. Sometimes they serve them in two cups, sometimes not. And I think that the vodka's not as strong as normal vodka. But it's still got the world's best novelty value! I can't exactly remember how many I had, but it was enough to keep me dancing for the rest of the night.

The club got a progressively more filthy as the night went on - by the end of it, there were occasional drops of water falling from the ceiling. I don't know how they got there, but it gets hot in Corp and I know the basics of condensation... and I'd rather not think of it too much past that. There were drunk people everywhere, most people's white shirts had stains of some description on them, Adam and Charlie ended up being featured on CorpTV (because there's a guy who walks around with a camera and a mic, and uploads the footage on to Youtube), and I got a bunch of good photos. I caught a taxi home with Patrick, Joey, Massi and Elizabeth at about 2.30am (or maybe a little later), and crawled into bed filthy but buzzed after what had turned out to be an awesome night.

Happy Un-Valentines!

Valentine's Day is a much bigger thing in the UK than it is back in Australia. Being up their with my least favourite holidays (picking the feast day of a saint to show how much you love your partner? Hint: anniversaries are much more important!), we decided to have a dinner for some of our friends at our flat. Fiona and I made chilli con carne, which worked out really well! We had Shannon and Elizabeth from our flat, then Patrick, Joey, VT Elizabeth, Astrid and Karsten over, and it was just really fun.

After dinner, we decided to play a couple of drinking games. We started with Kings, which got entertaining really quickly because some people were forgetting the rules. Astrid picked up that a lot of the rules were based on rhyming (such as 3: me, 6: chicks, etc) which meant that when she drew a 9, she yelled "Wine!"... it actually kind of worked for her that time, because she was drinking wine. It was only in the next round, when she drew an 8 and yelled out "Gate!" that it became funny. We told her that Adventure Time might come later, but there weren't any gates around Lawrencefield, so it might be a bit of a challenge.

At about 9pm, a bunch more people arrived, and it was actually really fun. We did a bit of socialising, played a couple more games and drank a lot more cider, until about 11 when most of the people were leaving to go to one of the Union parties called Population, including Patrick, Shannon and Karsten, who hadn't originally planned on going. Karsten said he had a "good feeling" about the night, and as he ended up hooking up, I think he was right. I stayed behind with Joey, Astrid, Elizabeth from my flat and one or two other people, and we played games until just after midnight. All in all, it was pretty solid!

Tuesday, I decided to stay in and have a quiet one. I knew we were planning on trying to get into Corp again on Wednesday night, so I just hung out and actually did some Uni work. Who would have thought I was here to study?

Lost Phones, Hockey Matches, Birthdays and Crepes!

The day after the afterparty at Teemu's was the last day of the Winter Varsity sport competition between Uni of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, and a bunch of us had tickets to the ice hockey match that was the highlight of the week. I was planning on meeting a couple of people at the Edge for lunch, and then we were all going to catch the bus there together.

However...

At about 10.30 in the morning, I got a text from Joey's mobile, saying "Found this phone, whose is it?'. Thinking that he must have left it at Teemu's, I replied "Joey's... did he leave it out last night?". I waited a while, during which time I got a bit confused until I got the reply saying "Er found it on the floor." I arranged to meet the phone-finder at the Edge, wondering where on earth Joey had left it. Turns out, he must have dropped it on the road at some point during his 200m stagger home the night before, and two English guys who live in the Village found it. I think it was lucky that they returned it and didn't keep it!

Anyway, after that excitement, I went and found the others in the Edge. I had a dry and disappointing sandwich, then realised I'd left my ticket at home, so had to hotfoot it back up the hill (and stairs) to my place and then rush back to the bus, where I ended up sitting next to someone I'd never met who didn't want to talk. I caught up with the others, and after we all had our faces decked out with yellow and black (Uni of Sheffield colours) and grabbed some paper flags, we got to our seats and waited for the game to begin.

I was surprised, because the game was actually really exciting! I'd never seen ice hockey before, but I think I'd be happy to go along again!! I think I annoyed Patrick sufficiently as well, when I was asking questions about how to play the game, not unlike when I was at the Super Bowl. My team lost, unfortunately... we were winning for the first two periods, but then Hallam got in a goal right at the end of the second period and then scored again at the end. Lauri was really disappointed with our team's performance - in his words "A bunch of girls who had never played before could have done better than that!". But he's Finnish, and because they get a lot of snow and ice, I'm assuming that means that he'd seen a lot of really good hockey in his time. My favourite part of it though was one of the chants - it was to the tune of 'Yankee Doodle', and went something like this:

"We go somewhere you don't go,

Uni! Uni!

We go somewhere you don't go,

University..."

And so on. It's because Hallam used to be a technical college, and was only turned into a Uni about 15 years ago. It'd be kind of like if they made CIT into a Uni, and we played against them in sport. After the match, Patrick and I somehow managed to lose everyone we knew, and so spent the bus ride home quoting Euro Trip.

When we got back, we all grabbed some dinner and then got ready to celebrate Lauri's birthday (which we were actually holding at my flat). People started arriving about 8.30, and we all had a fun time playing drinking games and getting Lauri drunk. Someone gave him a bottle of Captain Morgan's black rum, and he spent a large amount of time getting people to try it. Just a heads up: if someone ever has a bottle of this rum, don't do it. It's rough and nasty, and stopped me from ever wanting to be a pirate. There was a lot of cider of varying degrees of quality floating around, and everyone was having a good time. After a lot of drinks, the birthday boy headed home to sleep at about 12.15, and the rest of us carried on.

At about 1am, we headed off to Crewe flats to continue the party in their kitchen, where a guy called Matt was making crepes. They were amazing, and just when you had taken a bite of one, he'd have made another one, so that everyone could share in the deliciousness. Honestly, they were delightful, and if I could buy a Matt to make me crepes all the time, I'd think it was a worthwhile investment.

The party at Crewe flats ended up with us playing FlipCup (one of my new favourite games!) where my team won one round, then the other team won - during the celebrations for which, Fiona managed to cut her nose on her necklace. Sounds crazy, but it happened! And then we put on some music, pushed the tables out of the way, and had a mini dancefloor to Flo Rida and the Far East Movement. We all got home around 3am (I think, it might have been a bit later) and crashed pretty much right away.

Sunday was more or less a write-off; after a sleep in and grabbing some groceries, I didn't do much until the evening when we went downstairs for dinner (Massi cooked pasta with a bolognaise-type sauce) and then we headed over to the Edge for the pub quiz. We did alright, passing (even though some of the questions were really difficult - like "which Dancing on Ice judge made controversial comments last week?", which is really hard when you don't have a TV!) and I headed home at about 10pm after having my first dry night since arriving in Sheffield!

All about the vernacular

I forgot to add at the end of my last post that at Teemu's house was a guy from Sweden called Frederik, who lives in my building. Because it was just girls walking home, Frederik got a lot of our numbers, and made us promise to get in contact if anything went wrong. His exact words were, "If you get raped, text me, and I'll come and help!". I'm still not entirely sure how that would work, but hey, nice to know he cared!

Anyway, for those of you back home who had vague hopes of me returning with an English accent, I'll let you know now to avoid future disappointment that this is probably not going to happen. This is mostly because I'm spending a lot of my time with people who aren't English, even though I'm in England. We've started referring to the English as the 'natives' or 'indigenous ones', and seeking out friendships, to varying degrees of success. But that's not really what this post is about.

What I've noticed since being here is that every English-speaking country has totally different colloquialisms. Not that this is entirely unexpected, but especially in the case of my American friends, we've been having fun experimenting with what each other says. I've compiled a bit of a list of terms that I particularly like (some of which I'm definitely going to try and bring back... consider this a heads up!):

Browning Out - not quite blacking out, more like a haze. Browning out is when you're in a hungover state and you keep getting flashbacks to the previous night's adventures.
Hot Mess - someone who's not totally wasted, but definitely on their way.
Shitshow - the step beyond hot mess. Symptoms include dancing on tables, blacking or browning out, spilling drink everywhere (beyond usual clumsiness).
Throwing Down - to have a party. As in, "We're throwing down at our place tonight."
Pre-gaming - pre-drinking.
Sorostitutes - skanky girls (there are sororities in the States, so I'm assuming that this is where it came from).
Fries - count for everything except crisps. That's everything from French Fries to wedges.
Shwasted - a fun way of saying wasted.
"Sorry for Partying" - what you say if anyone gives you a strange look or tells you off for having too much fun. Can be used in pretty much any situation.
"Sorry I'm not sorry" - Kind of like "Sorry for partying".
Mattress - (German). Someone who sleeps around a lot.

Then I made another list of things that I say on a semi-regular basis that my international friends find amusing, that I didn't really realise were Australia-specific.

"I can't be bothered"
"Dodgy" - also dodge. They say "sketchy".
"Seedy" - in the hungover sense.
"Heaps" - apparently we say this 'heaps' and apply it to random things, like 'heaps of people' or 'heaps of fun'.
"Keen" - as in "I'm keen to go out tonight". It's just not used anywhere else.
"Rocked up"
"Stacked it" - to quote a friend of mine, "Why wouldn't you just say fell over?"
"Half past/quarter past/quarter to" - this one kind of surprised me.



And finally...

Some of my friends referred to a couple of things by abbreviations. I like them a lot. Used in everyday conversation, kind of like "FML".

FOMO - Fear of missing out. "I'm not sure if I want to go out, but Ive got really bad FOMO!"
BOMO - Black out/make out. When you've had a few drinks, and then the next thing you know, you're making out with someone. Sometimes as a result of wearing the beer goggles, sometimes not. As in, "So you and Peter then, hey?" "I barely remember. Effing BOMO!"

Then we (mostly myself and Elizabeth) got a bit creative and came up with these:

BOMA - Black out, make adventure. See this entry for background information.
BOMOA - Black out/make out adventure. Yet to happen, but you never know...



Yeah... I'm probably going to come home speaking like an American. Joey and Patrick think they're going to go home speaking like Australians (if they can ever get their vowel pronunciation right!). Which country am I in again??

House Parties, Card Games and Select & Save

Everyone was feeling a little bit seedy after Wednesday night, and so the boys at the bottom of my building decided to open their doors to have a chilled out night with everyone. We weren't entirely sure of the protocol when it came to chilling, so Astrid, Patrick, Fiona and I decided to go and buy a couple of drinks to take with us, and if we didn't get to drink them, then we could keep them for next time. So we headed off to the Select & Save (our local 24 hour bottle and grocery store), where we found cider. Big bottles of cider. In plastic bottles. I'm not even joking, you can get 3 litre bottles of cider in what look like enormous soft drink bottles. And they're less than four pounds a bottle. It's amazing... and if they're in the fridge, they just look like Sprite or 7-Up. Here's Fiona holding a bottle:

But I digress. So between the four of us, we bought two bottles of crappy two-for-a-fiver wine, and one of these ciders to mix with the wine so that we couldn't taste it. We rocked up to the boys' flat downstairs, and Akash looked at us and was like, 'So you guys are planning a big one then?', which hadn't really occurred to us, but we weren't entirely adverse to the idea. Joey had some drinks as well, and Amanda produced a pack of cards, and so we decided to play Kings (although, there was no cup. Aparently in the States they don't really play with a cup... which seems strange to me). I'm just going to add here, that Kings is a lot more fun when you're playing with people who don't have English as their native language. It can get hilarious. Add to the mix a couple of Finnish and German guys who drink pretty much as soon as they wake up, and you've got one hell of a game. At one point, Amanda drew the waterfall card. She began to drink, then Teemu (who's a tank, I'll add here), then Felix, Patrick, Astrid, me and so on. Amanda eventually stopped, but Teemu kept going. And going. And going. He was drinking from one of the big cider bottles - which was about half full - and it looked like he would be able to finish the entire thing! The rest of us started laughing (which is not easy when you're still trying to drink!) and eventually Joey pushed the bottle out of Teemu's mouth. He looked at us, confused, before saying, "but this is a drinking game. Why am I not allowed to drink?". None of us really had an answer for him.

That night, Elizabeth ended up taking a lot of photos of drunk Akash, which led to her creating a photo album on Facebook called "The Album of Akash". Astrid also managed to backhand the bottle of cider into the wall, where it started fizzing and wouldn't stop until we figured out that she'd somehow managed to put the wine bottle lid on to the cider bottle. I'm still not sure how she managed that. Oh, and Karsten went to the bathroom, and reappeared nearly half an hour later (just when we were sure that he'd passed out somewhere) wearing basketball shorts, socks and thongs. I managed to get a photo that is now the background image on my phone, so I start giggling every time I see it.

We eventually got home a lot more tipsy than we'd had the intention of getting. Luckily for me, my trip home was only up four flights of stairs, rather than across the Village.

Friday night, we had a couple of people over for dinner. Fiona and I did the cooking, and we made pasta with sauce, salad, garlic bread, and Shannon made new potatoes in the microwave. It was awesome! We had a couple of drinks and congratulated ourselves at being so domesticated. A few people were going to one of the Union parties called Space, but before that we went to one of the bars on campus where there were some other people we knew. That night, we'd bought a bottle of wine but didn't want to leave it at home after dinner, so we smuggled it into the bar and then a few of us (mostly Patrick) poured it from under the table. If I'm honest, I don't think that the bar people would have minded, they're pretty cool. I then played pool with Patrick against Lauri and Astrid - we won one game, which was awesome, and then lost the next. At about 12.30 the bar shut, but none of us were in the mood to go home, so we decided to go back to Teemu's place and continue drinking. I went and grabbed my stuff, and then asked Joey if he wanted to come with us. Somehow, in the hour and a half or so since I'd last talked to him, he'd managed to get shwasted. It was hilarious.

We went back to the Select & Save - we're pretty sure they know us now - and grabbed some more cider and a packet of crisps to share. Clemente and Lauri also got sandwiches. Joey liked the look of the sandwiches, said he was going to get one, did a lap of the store, and then wandered back over to us without a sandwich. We then traipsed off to Teemu's house, where we were later joined by Patrick and Shannon (who hadn't made it to Space), Elizabeth from E4 and a couple of others. Somehow I ended up with a Smirnoff Ice that I managed to nurse for about an hour (although Joey had some, because he lost four rounds of 'Up' in quick succession), and we had a great night. A few of us were talking in really bad accents, Joey reverted to the Deep South for about an hour, and then asked Felix why he spoke like Borat. Astrid ended up bailing quite early, because she was going to Oxford the next day, leaving at 8am... which didn't stop us from calling her weak. We're such nice friends. When it was time to go, we all ended up speaking in very bad Spanish, yelling out things like "Vamos!" and "A donde es mi cerveza?" and "Hola, amigo!" across the street to each other. I was kind of glad that Marta and Andrea, who are both from Barcelona, weren't there to hear it!

Impromptu Parties and School Uniforms

The day after Super Bowl was pretty quiet. I had to get up early to head in to Uni to get my timetable sorted, and after that I ran into Karsten, Akash, Lauri and Steffi, and we all grabbed lunch together in the Union building. We were later joined by Joey, Elizabeth and Patrick. Afterwards, I went into the city centre for the first time with Akash, Patrick, and Elizabeth, and we browsed through TopShop, TJ Hughes, Boots and Primark. We walked the way back (which is not really a short distance, and it's all uphill). That night, we grabbed dinner in the bar, and had a couple of drinks before heading in before midnight. Tuesday, we had a meeting in another bar in the Village, which was pretty much where we were getting a rundown on the rules and guidelines to living here. It was also Astrid's birthday, so Fiona bought her a cake and we smuggled it in to surprise her.

The meeting was pretty boring, as you can imagine, but afterwards we all grabbed drinks (can you see a theme here?) and played a couple of rounds of pool and Foosball. Fiona, Patrick, Joey and I brought the cake in (even with candles!), and Astrid was a mix of surprised, chuffed, and embarrassed - in a good way! We decided that we were having too much fun to let the night end there, so we told a couple of people to come back to our flat for a bit of a party. I went with Fiona, Patrick, Jeremy and Stephane to the bottle shop, where we stocked up on beer, wine and lemonade (in case the wine was gross... which it was). We headed back, picked up Astrid, and headed over to our flat. In the beginning there were maybe ten or fifteen people... then people just started turning up, and soon there were people we didn't even know there - but they all seemed to know other people, and our bedrooms were locked, so it wasn't too bad. It ended up being a really fun party!

Wednesday was, for me, a really chilled out day. I don't have classes then, so I slept in til about half past eleven, then went and mopped the kitchen floor (I was amazed at my domesticity. But it was really sticky). I was chilling in my room, when I heard someone walk through my flat and go into the kitchen. Thinking that it was one of my flatmates, I wandered in. Turns out, it was actually one of the maintenance men, who was fixing a chair that had a screw loose. So, I kind of nodded at him, knowing that I had zero chance of looking nonchalant and cool because I was still in my jammies, and kind of scuttled back to my room. I ended up going out to the shops, because we'd all heard of this huge school-themed party that's held at one of the clubs in town every Wednesday. Apparently, it's a pretty gross club but the drinks are dirt cheap, and everyone likes getting dressed up on a weekly basis. Plus, it's free entry before midnight if you're wearing a uniform. What I learned that afternoon mostly, is that it's really hard to find white shirts. I'm sure if you know where they are, it's good, but remembering that I'd not really looked for one in years, plus they don't have Big W or Kmart here. Even Primark was sold out. I ended up finding one for 1.50 in some random little shop, and was quite proud of myself.

At about 9pm, Fiona and I headed down to the Bar to meet some people for drinks before heading to Corporation. We'd heard the lines could get massive, and doors opened at 10, so we were planning on getting there just before. We eventually caught a taxi which dropped us right at the door... and there was no line! People were just walking in. So, we headed up and showed our ID's to the bouncers, who then asked us for our tickets. What tickets? He said that this was the ticketed entry door, and we'd have to go and join the line. We turned the corner of the building, and there we found the biggest line I've ever seen for a club. I'm serious... there were maybe 400 people standing there, and more arriving all the time. We walked up, and ran into Elizabeth, Shannon, Joey, Patrick, Allen, Shane, Massi and a few others, so we snuck in with them. Patrick revealed quite early on that he really had to go to the bathroom, and considering we were just behind halfway through the line, there would still be quite a wait before he would be able to use the bathrooms in Corp. I'd seen a Sainsbury's not too far away, and we reasoned that a big supermarket like that would be open at 10pm and have bathrooms, right?

Wrong.

Turns out that unlike other supermarkets like Tesco and Asda, Sainsbury's Sheffield shuts at 7pm. Patrick looked crestfallen at this (and pretty desperate too), but we spotted a sign towards public toilets. We went and found them, but unfortunately they'd been gated and locked. Patrick decided that there was no way that he could wait to find a pub or anything, so he spotted these big, triangular displays that had information about Sheffield written on them, and decided that they were big enough that he could use them as his cover. Unfortunately, with triangular displays, there's really not that much cover - there's always an angle from where people can see everything. He told me to keep a lookout, which I did. A couple of minutes later, this guy started walking through the displays. I tried to get Patrick's attention, failed, and hoped that he would hear the guy himself. Luckily, he did, and the guy to his credit was looking straight forward and totally avoided eye contact with Patrick. He did look at me though, and we had this awkward nod-like thing which let me know that the guy knew exactly what was going on, but was going to pretend he didn't. Good man.

Anyway, after that, Patrick and I burst out laughing and ran back to Corp, where we christened the story "Adventure Time 2.0" and then told it to the others, who really didn't seem to find it as funny as we did. The line had advanced a little bit in the fifteen minutes or so that we'd been gone, but really not that far. By the time 11pm rolled around, a few of us were getting restless. It had been an hour, if not a little longer, and it didn't look like anyone would be getting in before midnight. We discussed the merits of staying in line, where I was no longer interested, but Patrick, Fiona, Allen etc were all keen to stay. I ended up leaving for another club with Akash, Massi, Anne Sophie, Trista and a couple of others, where we found Lauri, Clemente, Felix and Sam, who had already bailed. Shane, Charlie and Superbowl Sam joined us not long after. Within about half an hour, just about everyone who'd been in line at Corp had joined us at Vodka Revs, where we made our own party. I had a Bakewell Tart flavoured shot, which was actually really nice (but I don't think it was that alcoholic). There was a alot of dancing - especially when Empire State of Mind came on - a lot of singing along, a lot of photos, and a lot of talking. It was a really fun night.

I headed home just after 1am, when Vodka Revolutions shut, and even made it back to Uni the next morning in time for my 10am lecture. Not going to lie, I was pretty proud of myself!